Karoline Leavitt is determined to get to the bottom of Escalatorgate.
The White House Press Secretary is demanding answers about a malfunctioning escalator and teleprompter that stole the show during President Donald Trump’s big speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday.
Trump, 79, and First Lady Melania, 55, were forced to walk up the escalator at the UN Headquarters in New York after it stopped moving shortly after they stepped on. The teleprompter also stopped working as Trump took the podium, prompting the president to read his remarks from a printout.
Fox News host Jesse Watters, along with several other conservatives, decried the incidents as “sabotage.”
“Well, Jesse, that’s definitely what it appears to be to me,” Leavitt told the host on Jesse Watters Primetime.
“First it was the escalator, then it was the teleprompter, and then Katie Pavlich from Townhall… noticed that the audio inside of the room was much lower and different for the President of the United States than the previous speaker,” she went on, arguing that “when you put all of this together, it doesn’t look like a coincidence.”
Leavitt said the Secret Service was already looking into the matter.
“If we find that these were UN staffers who were purposefully trying to trip up—literally trip up—the president and the first lady of the United States. Well, there better be accountability for those people, and I will personally see to it,” she concluded.
Watters similarly branded the incident “an insurrection” and joked that “what we need to do is either leave the UN or we need to bomb it.”
Earlier in the day, Leavitt posted on X a portion of a story from The Sunday Times that read, “UN staff members have joked that they may turn off the escalators and elevators and simply tell [Trump] they ran out of money, so he has to walk up the stairs.”
If someone at the UN intentionally stopped the escalator as the President and First Lady were stepping on, they need to be fired and investigated immediately.The Times reported this on Sunday.👇 pic.twitter.com/NitsWbGYG0
— Karoline Leavitt (@PressSec) September 23, 2025
But the answer might already be under the noses of Trump officials.
A source told the Daily Beast that someone in the president’s own entourage accidentally triggered the emergency stop.
The UN appeared to confirm as much in a statement clarifying that “a videographer from the U.S. delegation” stepped on the escalator ahead of Trump and Melania.
“A subsequent investigation, including a readout of the machine’s central processing unit, indicated that the escalator had stopped after a built-in safety mechanism on the comb step was triggered at the top of the escalator,” it said. “The videographer may have inadvertently triggered the safety function.”
The source also told the Beast that delegations were allowed to bring their own laptops and teleprompter operators, and that the UN was not running it during Trump’s speech. It was suggested that Trump’s team did not arrive early enough to ensure their equipment was properly set up.
Trump made sure the world knew about the minor inconveniences he had to endure.
“These are the two things I got from the United Nations: a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter,” he said during his speech.
The post Leavitt Floats Bonkers Escalatorgate Conspiracy Theories appeared first on The Daily Beast.
